Together
by Bainaku
Summary: Haruka and Michiru ask questions of one another through words, tenderness, and touch: will the answers satisfy them both?  Haruka and Michiru pairing.  Critiques and comments appreciated.


**Warning: **This story involves two women. _Together_. If you don't like that sort of thing, please don't read any further! Thanks so much!

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Sailor Moon. Haruka and Michiru are the brainchildren of the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

**Together**

The afternoon sun streamed in through the windows of Mugen Gakuen in great golden slats, and Tenoh Haruka inhaled as she stepped through pool after square pool of glimmering light, ignoring the clipped sound of her boots against the polished floor. Flicking an errant curl out of her eyes, the blonde woman lifted her head slightly and slowed down a bit, eventually pausing to gaze from one of the windows. Mugen Gakuen's courtyard was quiet, bathed in a wash of brilliance from the setting sun and specked with the forms of students retreating from the day's final practices. Some carried bokken over their shoulders, fresh from kendo and on the way home, intent on showers and dinner; others moved hand in hand, having been sneaking a quick kiss on the roof before being dislodged by the grouchy efforts of the janitor.

Haruka's lips quirked up into a faint smile at them all. Lifting a hand to let her fingers hover just centimeters from the pane of the window, splayed, she slanted her eyes and tipped her head back a bit. The sun's light trickled down her throat and between the stark white flaps of her collar; it collected in her breast around her heart, beating quiet and strong and somewhat weary for the downward tug of the day. In her other hand she held her school briefcase, flung back to hang against her shoulderblade, her palm curled in an easy grip about the worn black handle. She could still see her peers moving through the slits in her eyelashes, dark blurry shapes; she could hear them too, their voices carrying to her on the breezes privy to her command, yammering about grades and gossip and whose ass was the most prime.

Did any of those students possess pure hearts—talismans, lurking within the warm confines of their robust, youthful bodies? Was she letting them get away now, standing in the sun like a sponge with her mind on light thoughts: on the day's events gone by, class with Tanaka-sensei and worries about school that did not befit a magnificent soldier? She sighed, curling her hand and rapping her knuckles just once against the glass. She and Michiru would go looking tonight for the pure hearts and the talismans behind them, she knew, once the aquamarine-haired woman was out of lessons for the day: but had they wasted precious time attending classes? What was fighting a war for the world if only by night?

Haruka argued with herself for a moment. She knew searching by day was almost irrational in that the majority of attacks usually occurred in the early evening, when the sky bruised itself dark purple and the stars were only just beginning to wink above the line of the horizon. Besides, she and Michiru were forced to wait on the enemy's strikes to perform their own investigations—they had no means by which to extract hearts from anyone to examine them, and Michiru always said that it was easier to let the enemy do the work for them. "Let them waste their energy and effort," the woman was fond of chuckling. "It's easier to snatch the hearts of their victims from them than to try to find a way to do it ourselves."

The blonde woman dropped her hand to her side and shook her head. She was glad to have her days to herself—to flirt with the girls at Mugen Gakuen, though less the majority and one in particular. She was glad to fence with the school's fledging team, teaching them what she knew (which was almost everything, arrogance aside). She was glad to drive her car in the mornings down the fog-swept roads to the school, her hair scattering about on her head and the breeze tinged faintly with the smell of salt. It was like the ocean at a distance, for Michiru occupied her passenger seat now more often than not. And though her days gave her pleasure, she couldn't help but miss her nights: and she wondered what they might've been if there wasn't a war to fight on the rooftops, in the alleys, in the city's parks and spruced walkways. She wondered if she and Michiru might ever catch a movie, or settle for dinner in one of their apartments.

Haruka paused, opening her eyes to look from the window again. This time, however, her gaze was vacant, almost unseeing. She didn't bother to track the speck-like shapes of her retreating peers. She thought instead of Michiru, a head shorter than Haruka herself and a beacon of cool elegance, of imperturbable confidence. She encountered a whirlwind of emotions when she considered the other woman: an anger at having been torn from her former life of normalcy that was rapidly diminishing, she had to admit. There, too, was affection always growing, for Michiru's smiles and blushes and barbed comments.

Haruka understood a growing bond between them. They were friends—they were more, toeing the line between teasing and sincerity. Haruka felt an electric shock run along her spine each morning when Michiru brushed her fingers to say hello; she found her eyes wandering along the other woman's form at every opportunity, clad in sailor _fuku _or school uniform alike.

Smiling wryly and stroking her chin with long fingers, Haruka mused that it was especially hard to keep her gaze from Michiru when the woman wore a bathing suit. All that skin… all that _wet, _gleaming, _shining _skin…

She was drawn from her lecherous thoughts by the hoarse, grating whine of a tritone from the music practice rooms at the end of the hall. She winced when the dissonant interval was left to hover in the still air of the otherwise silent school, followed by no other notes or cues to soften or detract from its presence. It had been played on a piano too: she knew the cries, croons, and thrums of the instrument well, her specialty in the arts since childhood. She waited a moment, head turned in the direction of the sound, holding her breath to see if the person at the piano not so far away had the audacity to play the Devil's Note alone again.

Silence persisted a moment, and Haruka had time to exhale thinly through her nostrils before the next tritone groaned into existence. Fingers and a single eyebrow twitching involuntarily, the woman spun on her booted heel and stepped briskly toward the end of the hall. The door of the first practice room was ajar, and even the soft swirls of air through the metal vents of Mugen Gakuen told her—angrily! They didn't like it either: it was ugly, this ungodly noise!—that _this _was where the sound was coming from. They assured her that the culprit was waiting inside, perhaps even poised to tickle the ivory into vomiting forth another crippled interval.

The third tritone raked claws down her spine as Haruka closed her fingers over the handle of the practice room's door. Gritting her teeth, the soldier wrenched it open and snarled into the chamber, hardly thinking before she formed her words, "Don't play it alone!"

The woman on the piano bench some ten feet before her jerked about in surprise. Haruka saw with sudden horror that it was Michiru: the woman's pale fingers were still hovering over the white keys of the instrument in morbid fixation and fascination, and her teal eyebrows quivered on her forehead in her shock. Not since their first meeting had Haruka spoken to her with such vehement sharpness—the blonde soldier straightened, her cheeks flooding in her embarrassment. She still held the door handle tightly in one hand.

"Michiru," she began. She faltered, choking on her words before the woman she had come to care for so much in such a short time. Michiru blinked at her with wide eyes and a petulantly jutting lower lip, obviously awaiting an explanation; Haruka wanted to grind her forehead into her palm. Acting far less than magnificently now despite her signature phrase before their enemies, Haruka offered weakly at last, her face burning, "_Shit_, I'm sorry, I didn't know—"

"Does it bother you that much?" Michiru asked, neatly cutting in to save Haruka the trouble of stumbling over her words any longer. Her smile curled soft and kind along the soft contours of her lips, almost teasing and again not quite; she swung her legs easily over the edge of the bench and turned around, her hands twined together in her lap. Haruka couldn't help but notice that Michiru crossed her legs at the ankles. Perfect. Ladylike.

The blonde warrior swallowed hard, stiff in the entrance to the room; she released the door handle only through sheer willpower, forcing her fingers to uncurl from the cold surface. Stuffing the appendage in her pocket before it could cause trouble somehow, Haruka explained in a low rumble, "The air doesn't like it. It hurts—when it's alone, I mean. That's what it says."

Michiru arched an eyebrow fine as the swipe of a calligraphy brush at her, then smiled and nodded. She patted the empty space on the bench next to her quietly. "That makes sense," she said with a simple incline of the head. "Come sit with me. Show me how to play something."

"Don't you already know how to play the piano, Michiru?" Haruka returned the smile hopefully and moved to do as bid, taking a seat on the bench next to the woman. Michiru turned around to face the piano again. The taller woman settled her briefcase down beneath them and out of the way; it leaned against Michiru's like an old friend, darker and a little more worn than the other warrior's bag in that it wasn't so carefully tended.

Michiru wrinkled her nose, a playful expression. "Whether or not I do or don't doesn't matter," she told Haruka in a somewhat airy tone. "I want _you _to show me."

"I don't have much patience," warned Haruka. The currents of the air in the room were just beginning to calm down, reveling in the easy banter of conversation. They'd already forgotten the tritones.

She received a soft swat on the arm for her comment. "I don't make mistakes very often, do I?" Michiru's tone was sharp. Haruka flinched slightly—she'd begun to splay her fingers in the air above the keys but drew them back now, reluctant. Seeing her hesitation, Michiru sighed softly and settled one hand on her friend's knee, letting the other rise to the keys to coax forth the grating yowl of another tritone.

Haruka bristled, indignant and irritated. The air rattled fiercely in the vents and in her ears at the injustice; the groaned lull of the interval was worse than nails on a chalkboard. "Michiru—!"

"Hush," said Michiru gently in the shadow of the awful noise. She ran her fingers lightly along the crest of Haruka's knee—the blonde warrior froze, breathe catching in her throat and roses blooming unbidden in her cheeks. "Just answer it, Haruka, if it bothers you so much," Michiru continued. She smiled, looking up at the other woman out of the corner of a sly, glitteringly sincere eye. "I'm calling for you. Answer me—don't you want to?" Her voice shifted: it was breathy now, soft and butterfly-kiss quiet and lilting, and Haruka felt a piece of her soul shiver and melt for it, for the faint teasing hope behind Michiru's questioning words.

Michiru lifted her fingers a little and pressed them down again, strengthening the fading interval: and Haruka couldn't help but answer it indeed, playing a fourth tone behind it to soften the agonized groan into a startled, whimpering croon. She flexed her strong hands, beginning slowly, adding more notes to the quiet melody—it came from nowhere, a tune of anonymous origins and faint hesitations. It spilled from her fingertips in ginger spurts at first, a trickle here and a splash there: and then it was more, lulling a bit when Michiru stretched her hand lightly beneath both of Haruka's and played a tritone in the higher register.

"How badly does it ache?" the warrior asked softly of the taller woman. Her hand on the piano wasn't alone in movement: the fingers on Haruka's leg were shifting too, undulating caresses of nails and palm against the thin fabric of the troublesome uniform slacks. Each stroke was like the ocean, like the tide and the breakers, tugging and pleading and drawing Haruka in a little deeper with every passing second. She could smell the sea; the salt stung the corners of her eyes, tears of beautiful pain. As the tritone sobbed its agonies, the blonde woman thought she felt the crest of a wave brush her chin.

"Will you follow my call, Haruka?" Michiru pursued. "How far will you go? How high?" The _for me _was unspoken, but Haruka knew it was there.

She went up the keys like steps with her fingers, more quickly than before and certain now. She trapped Michiru's hand between her own, guided it back down the register where the shrieks and tinny screams of the notes they made together weren't so high, so dangerous, so wounding: she was the breeze in the woman's aquamarine hair, the kiss of the western wind along her pale throat and perfect cheeks, the loving and protective press at her back.

Michiru's fingers met the lowermost curve of Haruka's hip in the exploring circles of their caresses, and she deftly slid the hand beneath the woman's shirt to cup the swell of skin in a palm softer, Haruka thought, than the finest silk imaginable. Haruka let the melody between them fade and laced her own fingers over and through Michiru's on the surface of the keyboard, turning slightly to gaze down at the smaller woman. The air currents were pleased in her ears, lazy and warm in the downward slope of the afternoon, drunk with the music, the beautiful music, the music of light and purity and wind on water.

"I'll follow you," Haruka murmured, and ran her thumb over Michiru's knuckles in promise, "anywhere."

And then she wondered, in the windy haze of her thoughts, whether or not Michiru would follow her if she happened to wander too: she wondered if the sea chased its own breezes, if the tides would turn when gales came calling in mournful loneliness. She wondered, more than anything, if Michiru could love her—if the warrior of the oceans could learn to open her arms to the sky. Haruka knew she had already given Michiru her everything even in being with her just a few short weeks: her trust, her friendship, her heart to be broken if necessary.

She wondered if Michiru would break that heart. The sea, after all, could be a cold and merciless presence.

She had no need to ask the question aloud. Perhaps Michiru saw it in her eyes, in the subtle curves of her face; maybe she even felt the agonizing tension in the palm Haruka had pressed to her own. Her gaze softened—arching shallowly upward so her aquamarine locks fell away from her cheeks like silent breakers, she closed her lips over Haruka's and kissed her.

The blonde soldier stiffened and resisted the urge to jerk away in her startlement—she folded her hand down over Michiru's on the keyboard, feeling the world surge and shudder around her. The piano whimpered a soft protest in C minor. Just this simple brush of lips was like drowning, exquisite pain—the rush and roar of the ocean throbbed in her ears. She wanted it; she was afraid of it too, of being taken from air and light and the winds of her realm; of showing Michiru, more so, a world of sharp edges and dustdevils and dryness, where tenderness hid behind high dunes and the sky went on forever. Would she sink; would Michiru fade against her? She slanted her eyes despite herself, gazing at the other woman through the golden blur of her lashes: wanting, needing, _aching_.

Michiru eased back the slightest bit and Haruka was surprised to both hear and feel her laugh, a warm puff of breath against her mouth. Undaunted and tender, the smaller soldier slid her hand from beneath her friend's shirt and let it glide upward along the muscular side, teasing over breast and collar and shoulder, nails grazing a throbbing pulsepoint, before she cupped Haruka's cheek in her palm and murmured, her voice coaxing, loving, pleading, "Oh, Haruka—it's all right. We'll go together, won't we?" And then, tracing her lips along the corner of the taller woman's in a searing hope, "Why don't you open your mouth a little?"

"Michiru…" Haruka breathed. Closing her eyes, she pressed the last syllable of the name into a kiss that bloomed and blossomed between them, heat and smoldering passion and silken contact, a melody of shy hands and hearts shier still. They drowned and plunged, indeed, together: they soared too, and when it became too much for just a kiss, Haruka wrapped her arms around Michiru and clasped her close. Michiru twined and buried her fingers in the taller soldier's golden locks.

The embrace seemed to span eons and again mere seconds, and they both gasped regret into one another's cheeks when it was over. Haruka, hearing the footsteps of the janitor near the end of the hall, cursed under her breath; Michiru giggled softly against her throat and traced her thumb lovingly along the strong jaw. When she pulled back to snatch their satchels from the floor, Haruka was delighted to find that her friend's cheeks were pink and growing darker still, her chest quivering beneath the strictly tailored collar of her uniform.

Michiru gave Haruka her bag and the violin to carry; she turned quickly, closing the piano with an expert flick of wrists deceptively strong, and they rose and stepped from the room together before they could be caught by wandering eyes. They looked the same as any other pair of students when they left the doors of Mugen Gakuen and moved across the courtyard, approaching the parking lot: and then they were more, for Michiru hooked her arm in Haruka's and twined their fingers as they walked, leaning gently against her in the gathering dusk.

—Owari

**Notes: **To say Sailor Moon wasn't my first real obsession would be lying. Haruka and Michiru meant very much to me then, still do, and always will, even though they are fictional: together, they represent a strength I can only hope to one day achieve again with someone else. I hope you enjoyed reading this short fic as much as I enjoyed writing it—critiques, comments, and fluffy hats are very much appreciated.

Thank you, Alicia and Lizzie, for reading this beforehand. This is dedicated to the two of you—and to one special other, my only and my heart. I miss you so very much.

—Bainaku


End file.
